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The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol

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This is the Lit Aube et Crépuscule (Dawn and Twilight bed) by Emile Gallé. It was made in 1904 and is at the Musée de l'Ecole de Nancy. The materials include Rosewood, ebony, mother of pearl and glass. The bed symbolizes dusk, dawn and life. Dusk is a butterfly at the headboard with a landscape of night. Dawn is a butterfly at the foot of the bed, illustrating the renewal of the day. The crystal part of Dawn is said to represent life as a “cosmogenic egg”. For more info see the museum’s website here.

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“The desire to be ‘accurate’ suddenly disappears when sex isn’t involved and it is actual interesting day to day minutiae,” says Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian who teaches at the London School of Economics. “If the (‘Game of Thrones’) world was historically accurate, why isn’t every single noble house or castle absolutely covered by huge gaudy, colourful murals? Why is it that this form of historical accuracy isn’t important, but showing rape as endemic is?”

Other historians point out that, as prurient and gasp-worthy as something like a crude C-section death is, such butchery wasn’t as prevalent as storytellers would have you believe.

“They were very keen on protecting mothers from harm,” medieval history scholar Sara McDougall told Slate.

Texts from the time indicate that such extreme measures would usually be performed on women who had already died – not, as in “House of the Dragon,” a fully awake and alert woman with no clue what was about to happen to her.

[…]

Janega points out that, while medieval times were certainly not overkind to women or anyone else who wasn’t rich, powerful and male, they weren’t the burlesque of suffering we’re so used to seeing on screen.

“'Accuracy’ is always focusing on the distasteful aspects of a society, but never the pleasurable ones,” she says. “(It) somehow always encompasses sexual violence and never things like, for example, the three field system, or fishing weirs. They don’t really show how women other than the nobility are a dynamic part of the medieval workforce. Women are found in pretty much every facet of medieval work: as blacksmiths, running shops, brewing beer, in cloth production, running bath houses or in trading delegations addressing the court.”

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So I've seen conflicting stories about the colour black in history.

Some say it's very expensive and hard to maintain, so that's why rich merchants wore black. Evidence in portraits.

Some say that for dyes it's on the cheaper side actually.

Some say the expensive black doesn't come from dye but rather the colour of the animal, so black fabric comes from black fibre which comes from black sheep. How exactly would black sheep be more expensive than regular white sheep?

Which one is right? I know this is probably influenced by which century it's set in, like maybe some eras have an easier time getting black dye

I found a well-sourced blog post about this, luckily, because I'm a 19th-century focused researcher and I've heard conflicting things about black in earlier periods. It seems to be that high-quality black-dyed fabric was difficult to obtain in the west from the Middle Ages potentially through the 18th century because it required massive amounts of dye to get the color very deep ("true black"). Lesser black shades were quite common, though, so black, period, doesn't seem to be more expensive than any other color. Possibly the intensively dyed, deep blacks might have been? But not black in general.

source

Rich merchants did wear black- but so did other people. They just usually didn't have portraits.

The black sheep thing I've never heard before. And anyway, that could only apply to wool- not cotton, linen, silk, leather, etc.

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✧ Lambda Serpentis ✧

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I've started the process of documentation on the last labyrinth, which is...an undertaking.

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In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

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people have these “my dog is a democrat” stickers and I like to imagine them with increasingly unlikely animals professing more niche political opinions:

my parrot is a democratic socialist

my arctic fox is an anarchopastoralist

my catfish believes in the divine right of kings

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There's an old probably apocryphal tale about Lyndon Johnson that was popularized by Hunter S. Thompson which goes like this:

This is one of the oldest and most effective tricks in politics.  Every hack in the business has used it in times of trouble, and it has even been elevated to the level of political mythology in a story about one of Lyndon Johnson’s early campaigns in Texas.  The race was close and Johnson was getting worried.  Finally he told his campaign manager to start a massive rumor campaign about his opponent’s life-long habit of enjoying carnal knowledge of his own barnyard sows. “Christ, we can’t get a way with calling him a pig-fucker,” the campaign manager protested.  “Nobody’s going to believe a thing like that.” “I know,” Johnson replied.  “But let’s make the sonofabitch deny it.”

Tumblr keeps making me think of this anecdote. There's a group of users on here who constantly demand if anyone mentions BDSM positively or even neutrally they caveat it by saying they aren't talking about abuse or if a man likes to call his boyfriend daddy they demand he disclaim that he doesn't support incest or if a trans girl likes to wear cat ears she needs to deny that she isn't into bestiality.

The point of this isn't that they actually believe it themselves or even a lot of the time it isn't about convincing other people that it's true but just to tar people by creating the association between two unrelated things by demanding that people constantly deny it.

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You know what you REALLY can’t kill in a way that matters? Mint.

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I'm just saying, if there's a curse that runs along your family line and you don't tell your kids about it, how the hell are they supposed to go on a quest to stop it?

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Ushiku Daibutsu, Japan. Photography by Yuya.M @yuyar33

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Masterpost

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